"If you care a lot about the future, it shows that you believe in what you're doing now and you think it's worthwhile enough to have some lasting impact." – Syd Mead

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Month: June 2015

This question made me conscious of the fact that the icons computer/smartphone and many web interfaces use are a metaphor for the way in which the industry has designed computers for a consumer market. That is, they are to be used to digitize and simulate old media.

For example, the use of the now-obsolete floppy disk to represent “save?”

The way this question is asked is interesting and encouraging. These icons no longer make sense to modern users. Another interesting question is what should replace them? However, without powerful outlooks, I suspect it’s going to be difficult to come up with anything that really captures the power of this medium that is computing, and we’ll just use the default of ourselves as metaphors.

In my time on Quora.com, I’ve answered a bunch of questions on object-oriented programming (OOP). In giving my answers, I’ve tried my best to hew as closely as I can to what I’ve understood of Alan Kay’s older notion of OOP from Smalltalk. The theme of most of them is, “What you think is OOP is not OOP.” I did this partly because it’s what’s most familiar to me, and partly because writing about it helped me think clearer thoughts about this older notion. I hoped that other Quora readers would be jostled out of their sense of complacency about OO architecture, and it seems I succeeded in doing that with a few of them. I’ve had the thought recently that I should share some of my answers on this topic with readers on here, since they are more specific descriptions than what I’ve shared previously. I’ve linked to these answers below (they are titled as the questions to which I responded).

A big thing I realized while writing this answer is that Kay’s notion of OOP doesn’t really have to do with a specific programming language, or a programming “paradigm.” As I said in my answer, it’s a method of system organization. One can use an object-oriented methodology in setting up a server farm. It’s just that Kay has used the same idea in isolating and localizing code, and setting up a system of communication within an operating system.

Another idea that had been creeping into my brain as I answered questions on OOP is that his notion of interfaces was really an abstraction. Interfaces were the true types in his message passing notion of OOP, and interfaces can and should span classes. So, types were supposed to span classes as well! The image that came to mind is that interfaces can be thought to sit between communicating objects. Messages, in a sense, pass through them, to dispatch logic in the receiving object, which then determines what actual functionality is executed as a result. Even the concept of behavior is an abstraction, a step removed from classes, because the whole idea of interfaces is that you can change the class that carries out a behavior with a completely new implementation (supporting the same interface), and the expected behavior for it will be exactly the same. In one of my answers I said that objects in OOP “emulate” behavior. That word choice was deliberate.

This seemed to finally make more sense for me than it ever had before about why Kay said that OOP is about what goes on between objects, not what goes on with the objects themselves (which are just endpoints for messages). The abstraction is interstitial, in the messaging (which is passed between objects), and the interfaces.

This is a conceptual description. The way interfaces were implemented in Smalltalk were as collections of methods in classes. They were strictly a “gentleman’s agreement,” both in terms of the messages to which they matched, and their behavior. They did not have any sort of type identifiers, except for programmers recognizing a collection of method headers (and their concomitant behaviors) as an interface.

This last answer gets to what I think are some really interesting thoughts that one can have about OOP. I posted a video in my answer from a presentation by philosopher Daniel Dennet on “Free Will Determinism and Evolution.” Dennet takes an interesting approach to philosophy. He seems almost like a scientist, but not quite. In this presentation, he uses Conway’s game of “life” to illustrate a point about free will in complex, very, very, very large scale systems. He proposes a theory that determinism is necessary for free will (not contrary to it), and that as systems survive, evolve, and grow, free will becomes more and more possible, whereby multiple systems that are given the same inputs will make different decisions (once they reach a structured complexity that makes it possible for them to make what could be called “decisions”). I got the distinct impression after watching this that this idea has implications for where object-orientation can go in the direction of artificial intelligence. It’s hard for me to say what this would require of objects, though.